February 21, 2007

The Saffron Kitchen author Yasmin Crowther is the product of an Anglo-Iranian household (Iranian mother and British father). She says that she "feels like I am a part of both places and not fully understood by either place", and that's one reason she wrote The Saffron Kitchen, her first novel, to try and communicate how difficult it is to bridge both worlds, and yet how fundamentally essential it feels to be able to make that bridge. Her mother, like Maryam in The Saffron Kitchen, grew up in Mashhad, and spent her summers in a village which is the basis of the fictional Mazareh. Like Maryam, her mother also came to England in her twenties; but there the similarity between Crowther's protagonist and her mother ends, she assures us The Saffron Kitchen is entirely fictional >>> Book review -- Sent by Darius Kadivar

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